Site Showcase: My Ayurvedic Kitchen

I'm excited to share this site with you today, because it started my journey on my love of the Brine Template. It was when designing this site when I learned how to truly maximize the footer + header to it's fullest potential. The combo of the footer + the grid format for blogging sold us on this template for life!

Client's Site Description: Ayurvedic Cooking Food Blog

Template Chosen: Brine

Why did you choose that template?: We chose the brine template for the purpose of a few things. First being the header, the client wasn't sure about alignment when we were in the mockup stage, and blog sidebars were not important. So with those things in mind, Brine was the best to get the grid layout for the blog page plus the flexible header. We also wanted to be sure we had the multi-part footer so we could make one the index category section and hide it on the recipe page :)

What was the Client's Objective?: To create a site that had her love of watercolor texture, bright colors and white space all in one to highlight her Ayurvedic food.

Tell us a bit about the design process?: For this project we started with custom branding including lots of watercolor illustrations that we used in the branding, and throughout the site design. We had herbs, wreaths, block prints and more! From there, we then created a web mockup to be sure our brand was on point for web. Once the site was implemented we added in her content. The project was extremely seamless once we did the hard work behind the custom illustrations.

How did you help the client differentiate their business through design?: We wanted to integrate design a lot more than many food bloggers do. As well as create a way that she could write about the ayurvedic principals. It was really important that we integrated the design in a way that really allowed people to learn not just paruse photos of food.

Is there custom development? What about custom added CSS? Can you tell us why you did or did not use these edits?: No custom development, but tons of CSS, background images + illustrations embedded all over :)

What are the top three creative features you used in the design?: The category footer which we hid and created a similar one on the top of the recipe page. We used span elements for illustrations within the gallery on the homepage, and added a custom print recipe block.

Meg S. is a graphic designer and blogger hailing from the small state of Rhode Island. Armed with her MFA in graphic design from SCAD and loads of squarespace knowledge, she runs her own studio Meg Summerfield Creative, as well as her food blog Summerfield Delight. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Square Design Guild, a membership group for designers who use the squarespace platform.